After messing around with
AntiX, the idea of installing bare-bone Debian and JWM sounds very tempting to me...
Anyways, I've tried quite a few WM/DE over the past few years or so (my main os is still windows but whatever).
I'd pick cinnamon as my DE of choice due to its practicality. Followed by XFCE I guess. These two never let gave me up, let me down nor run around and desert me. Never let me cry, never say goodbye nor tell a lie and hurt me.
Anyways here's my review of all DE/WM I've tried
Unity
It was 2015 and my then-school bought a new set of PC, which came pre-installed with Ubuntu. It was my first exposure to the Linux operating system. And it was solid I guess? I remember my classmate trying to install Minecraft on it (they failed) and my teacher struggling with LibreOffice lol.
Cinnamon
I've dual-boot windows and Linux Mint Cinnamon on multiple occasions. The UI/UX may seems old and boring. But it's very reliable and never breaks. And you also don't get overwhelmed with gazillions of settings unlike a certain desktop environment. I'd probably migrate to Linux Mint Cinnamon after windows 10 EOL cuz it's the most practical of all I suppose.
KDE
I've messed around Kubuntu earlier this year. Although it's still on the latest release of KDE 5, things break left, right and centre. KDE somehow set my mouse speed randomly everytime I boot into my PC. The settings app is also somewhat buggy. And despite having gazillions of customization options, I can't find a way to theme it natively without relying on third-party tools like Kvantum and qt5ct (or it could be that I haven't find the right docs lol) The UI is also overwhelming, giving user thousands of options at once without telling which setting does what.
XFCE
I installed Mint XFCE to school PC when I was in high school btw cuz the machine is so old it can barely runs Windows 7 (I mean, Core 2 Duo with onboard graphics 2 GB of RAM......in 2020!!! It can barely load web browser, let alone watching any YouTube video (which the teachers often use it for)). It's lightweight and stable. Altough things could break if you messed around too much. Good for lower-end PCs I guess. I also like the fact that it's modular (
I've set up i3 with XFCE panel lol). But if you have somewhat of a modern machine I'd suggest using cinnamon instead.
MATE
It is what it is. A modernised Gnome 2. And I cannot launch Caja (the file manager) from terminal for some reason. So use XFCE instead I guess.
Gnome
It has the best touchpad support I guess. But I don't like their design philosophy. It feels like using a tablet rather than a PC. And it feels like they wasted a lot of spaces in the UI especially in Gnome 40 onwards.
Enlightenment
I've tried it using
Bodhi Linux. The UX looks straight out of the 90s/early 2000s. Although very lightweight at around 350MB idle (booting from a Live ISO image from my USB stick), I think I'd be better off using XFCE or bare-bone WM without DE.
LXQt
The most lightweight of them all (theoretically speaking). The fact that you can change WM on-the-go means that you'd get the basic functionalities and GUI settings for your WM without having to configure the scary non-WM-related config files (like xrandr etc.) Which seems good to me, but I've never dive that deep into this DE.
speaking of WM.......
Openbox
Remember the Mint XFCE school PC I mentioned earlier? well, before installing that I used to run
NomadBSD (yes technically not linux but whatever) off of an USB stick in order to get YouTube and web browser somewhat working. If I remember correctly, NomadBSD uses Openbox. It has all the basic functionalities of what you'd expected from a windows manager and also very lightweight. Other than that, idk.
JWM
Same with Openbox but it's SO F*CKIN SNAPPY. AntiX + JWM uses only 200-300 MEGABYTES of RAM, while running from a USB stick.
IceWM and Fluxbox
Also came pre-installed within AntiX ISO. Does the same stuffs as Openbox and JWM and also have very minimal footprints. But I think those two looks better.
i3
Ah yes... Tiling Windows Manager. I like the idea of it but you've to set everything... and I mean EVERY GOD DAMN THING manually. You could argue that Openbox, JWM, IceWM and Fluxbox are equally hard to set up, but there're lots of distros, like MX linux fluxbox, AntiX, NomadBSD and a lot more, offering those bare-bone WM without a full DE which came fully pre-configured and 99% of the functionalities you'd expect from a working PC...works. Things like closing the laptop lid and the screen locks automatically etc and ALL multimedia keys working by default, as well as some GUI settings apps. i3, on the other hand, only came with like 50% of stuffs working and without any GUI. Yes,
I've spent some time and configured it. But in the end, when I wipe off the Linux partition cuz I need more disk space, I was still using
sudo reboot now
and
sudo shutdown now
to reboot and shutdown while in the i3 session. (I mentioned about using XFCE panel earlier, but in the end that's too wonky I reverted to the default panel which, you know, sucks).
Qtile
mostly the same with i3 except this thing is an auto tiler. It appears to have solid documentation. But unlike i3, I don't even know where to start configuring this thing. (even if I mainly do programming in Python). AND installing a whole ass Windows Manager from pip.... YES, pip, the Python package manager. seems quite funny and cute to me.
That's all of my rant I guess.